By Abe Kasbo

Ok, so here comes the obligatory response to the SuperBowl ad, right? Well, sort of. Let me start with the drumbeat about the demise of the 30-second spot. Here’s my take, the demise of the 30 second spot has less to do with the media fragmentation than with non-descript creative, making television commercials not worth watching.

Research tells us people will watch commercials if they are compelling. So where’s beef? What happened to creative juices that gave us cool Superbowl commercials? By the way, why can’t we have cool commercials all the time? Why do we wait for the Superbowl to talk about commercials? Advertisers get what’s coming to them here…waiting all year to put together something interesting…And in 2008, we got nothing worth talking about except for Danica’s beaver.

GoDaddy got it right, do something outrageous, have the networks reject it, then do a commercial about the networks rejecting it and send everyone to your website…brilliant! Now – excuse the obligatory lingo – that’s leveraging your media.

Give me a break guys, let’s develop cool, year-round campaigns for our clients…I mean GEICO and AFLAC don’t have the markets cornered on talent…

- the following are comments added on Tuesday, February 5…

Got a flood of analysis today about the SuperBowl commercials by email. I am now convinced that I am living on another planet. Check out this analysis by the Boston Globe…A talking baby commercial? Brilliant. I guess if it was the most replayed by TiVoers, then it must be good, hmmm? Could it be because it’s the best of a mediocre bunch commercials?

Oh well, there’s always next year.